More Spoilers From Mad Max: Fury Road Screening

Last week Mad Max: Fury Road had a test screening in Los Angeles.  The movie was screened at the AMC Burbank 16 at 7pm PST, invites were sent out privately, obviously, for select individuals aged between 13-54 with the former children being +1.  Several reports had circulated, most positive.

At the weekend more reports popped up throughout various social media outlets and websites.  Here they are, beware of SPOILERS.

Well, I was at the screening on Wednesday as well, and I have a very different take. To be fair, I walked in with reasonably lowered expectations, but I still found it falling far below them. The movie is essentially one long chase scene with barely a hint of plot or characterization. The action scenes (which comprise basically everything) are relatively well done, but the cardinal sin committed by Miller is that he actually makes Max a tangential character in the story. MINOR SPOILERS: Max is captured by Immortan Joe’s people about three minutes into the film (the V8 interceptor is immediately trashed and stolen) and then held as a helpless captive mounted on the hood of a truck for the next half hour. END SPOILERS When he does enter the story, he does nothing to effectively alter it at all. He may as well not be there.

Hardy has about five or six lines of dialogue in the whole film, and he does them in a VERY deep voice with occasional hints of an Aussie accent (it’s not Bane, but it’s close). Other than that he grunts a lot. I’m sad to report that he’s pretty badly miscast here. Hardy plays the role like an unkillable bulldog without a hint of intelligence, whereas Gibson’s take on the character always presented Max as actually thinking his way through action sequences rather than simply being a brute force battering ram. There are some moments of weirdness, albeit all too few (and most are just dropped in without explanation and quickly dismissed) but the film is mostly comprised of an endless car and truck chase that begins at Immortan Joe’s Citadel stronghold and then goes out into the desert before turning right back around and going back to the starting point. It’s one long videogame sequence that played for over two hours but felt like six. Endless action gets dull when there’s not a hint of character to be seen.

The closest we get to anything about Max is when he has a few flashes of his thirteen year old daughter (yes, I know he had a son in the original film, don’t know where a daughter came from) appearing and saying “you promised to save us!” That’s it.

The movie is, to put it mildly, a complete and total mess No plot, no character, unending chase scenes, a sense of Max being a tourist passing through the movie… oh, and it’s fucking PG-13. No blood or nudity whatsoever. It cuts away anytime something might be too brutal for younger viewers.

Lower your expectations, folks. It’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s also not very good. I mean, THUNDERDOME actually towers above it. And lest you think I’m a hater, I went with a group of both MAD MAX lovers as well as newbies, and all of them HATED it. My prediction: fanboys will be annoyed, and MM virgins will be uninterested. This is not the franchise restart WB is hoping for. At all.

I saw it last night. Enjoyed it a lot and what’s great is that it’s not afraid of being strange. It’s definitely got a weird sensibility and isn’t afraid of wearing its bizarre touches out in the open, in a great way. It’s got awesome action absolutely drenched with imagination. Cool costumes, designs and music (hope they keep it!). Solid performances. The pacing is sometimes too fast or slow, par for the course at this point, and I wish the movie had more quiet, contemplative moments that contrast the action and deepen the world. But even so, it was touching, esp in how it showed characters losing and gaining hope in an utterly depressing world. The fact George Miller was able to bring his weird, personal vision to such an epic picture within the studio framework is a giant accomplishment. Wish we’d gotten a chance to see Miller’s Justice League or Hobbit. He’s a true visionary, bringing a unique pov and poetic understanding to the action.